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Art as a metaphor of the mind

A neo-Jamesian aesthetics embracing phenomenology, neuroscience, and evolution

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the emergent neo-Jamesian perspective concerning the phenomenology of art and aesthetic experience. Starting from the distinction between nucleus and fringe in the stream of thought described by William James, it can be argued that our appreciation of a work of art is guided by a vague and blurred perception of a much more powerful content, of which we are not fully aware. Accordingly, a work of art is seen as a kind of metaphor of our mental life, objectified to be able to reach out to a much larger audience. However, it is a “realistic” theory rooted in evolutionary psychology, which claims that our mind developed within a framework shaped by environmental pressures. The aesthetics illustrated by several novelists develops a paradigm for this theory. The search for the neuronal correlates of stream of consciousness allows to make a comparison with the recent findings of neuroaesthetics and to reject its claim that it is unnecessary to take phenomenology and psychology into account.

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Notes

  1. In this context, consciousness indicates the mental space of first and second degree awareness (of reality and of ones self; of being aware of reality and of oneself) within which the processes of thought take place—in a lateral sense—and of which we can have knowledge/awareness or near knowledge/awareness (see the below concept of fringe, which is linked to the non-conscious functioning of the mind but is in constant—and visible—relation with consciousness).

  2. The contemporary rediscovery of the fringe surely draws upon a wide phenomenological tradition. Husserl describes a “lateral background information that forms the horizon or Jamesian ‘fringe’ of every perception. The simplest type of background is the perceived background of a thing against which this is seen” (Mulligan 1995:71). In Husserl’s words, What is now perceived and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (or at least somewhat determinate), are penetrated and surrounded by an obscurely intended to horizon of indeterminate actuality. I can send rays of the illuminative regard of attention into this horizon with varying results. Determining presentations, obscure at first and then becoming alive, haul something out for me; a chain of such quasi-memories is linked together; the sphere of determinateness becomes wider and wider, perhaps so wide that connections is made with the field of actual perception as my central surroundings (Husserl 1913/1983:52).

  3. The conferences collected in the book were delivered in 1965; S. Langer is never quoted in the text.

  4. Husserl himself recognizes that “James was alone, as far as I know, in becoming aware of the phenomenon of horizon—under the title of ‘fringes’ (Husserl 1936/1970:264).

  5. We will see that Mangan believes this characteristic provides the evaluative explanation of the fringe (albeit explained in different terms) and of its pervasive role in our mental life.

  6. The comprehensive description of the tip-of-the-tongue state occurs on a phenomenal/subjective level: it is what we feel when we have a word on the tip of our tongue; the feeling has been analysed thanks to introspection and knowledge of psychology. However, it does not descend to the level of the physiologic aetiology of “disruption” or to that linked to neurobiological causes.

  7. For special aspects of the fringe, also see Baars (1993) and Velmans (1993).

  8. As fringes are contextual rather than substantial, it seems that there can be overlapping levels in a phenomenological space. But in this paper it is not possible to further delve into the topic.

  9. The concept of familiarity also emerges in James: this appears to indicate that his idea of fringe includes the two meanings identified by Mangan, albeit superimposed and indistinct.

  10. The definition evidently runs the risk of being circular. One should say that nothing is really “new” if not as a recombination of known elements; also note the assonance with James’ “fitting the mould” in the tip-of-the-tongue, case, i.e. the mere recovery of a thought or a memory. A more detailed discussion follows.

  11. The relatively reduced dimensions of conscious space, with the ensuing “shifting” of attention, are highlighted by other cognitive psychologists, such as Mandler (1975) and Baars (1988). “Without our perceptual constraints (to use a few examples that come to mind), movies would look like a series of still photographs, television screens and computer monitors would exhibit scannings and refreshings, not moving pictures, and the music on compact disks would suffer 44,000 audible interruptions per second between the digital samplings. Or as Alexander Pope put it, we’d die of a rose in aromatic pain” (Fromm 2003a:92).

  12. It is clearly an hypothetical explanation of the fringe evolution, an explanation consistent with the mainstream Darwinian evolutionary psychology. But one could reject it as a “just-so-story” (Dupré 2001.chap. 2–4) without discarding the concept of fringe.

  13. The idea of art as a metaphor of mind somehow echoes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of visual art expressed in Eye and Mind (1964). There is no distinction, he says, between the artwork and our mental representation of it, because both of them are made of the same stuff and share a unity of Being. “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings”: the thing indeed “makes itself visible in us”. So the painter has to search for the life of the seeable, his inner “mystery of passivity”, his bodily subjectivity.

  14. There are numerous examples in the work; in Guermantes (Proust 1923–1927), as he goes back home, the main character is struck by a sequence of moments bienheureux: the rutted gravel, the sound of a spoon rapping a plate, a napkin, a book lying open bring back memories of images and feelings of his childhood and of previous journeys, with their momentous load of perceptive and spatial details, of emotions and wishes described with unrivalled mastery.

  15. The evocation of fleetingness is immediate, characterising the ordinary functioning of the fringe and of aesthetic experience in so far that it is the special status/ mode of consciousness emerging from evolution.

  16. Dryden (2004) criticizes the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memories pointing out that there is a conceptual component in both which would enable a level of discrimination to be made, not a radical qualitative uniformity.

  17. This is the position of Susanne Langer (1942, 1953). Donald Dryden (2001, 2003, 2004) performed a faithful rereading of Langer’s aesthetics in neo-Jamesian terms. The world of feeling is fleeting and hence it is deemed to be formless, chaotic, and irrational. Likewise, Langer believes in the scientific knowledge of consciousness and subjective experience. If language becomes unsuitable, then psychology must look elsewhere. A naïve yet deep knowledge of the dynamics of conscious mental life comes from works of art, “perceptible forms expressive of human feeling” (Langer 1962:84) and the “feeling is like dynamic and rhythmic structures created by artists” (Langer 1967:64). “Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of ‘felt life’ (…) into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures. They are images of feeling that formulate it for our cognition” (Langer 1957:25). In this sense, art objectifies the dynamics of conscious experience into physical means: without this process, we would not be conscious of them or remember them.

  18. Millikan (1984) also endorses the idea that mental states have developed their representational function since they endow the agents with an adaptive advantage.

  19. Galin believes there is even a fringe component in voluntary memories; his understanding of James’s metaphor of the river always includes water (the fringe) which flows over and around the outcropping rocks (the nucleus). Galin renames the nucleus “feature awareness”, since it involves the dimension of consciousness which concentrates on salient “characteristics”, while the fringe is “explicating awareness” since its function is that of “explaining” such “characteristics” with contextual information. Epstein (2000b) admits that a careful review of the “stream of thought” leads one to see every substantive thought as a nucleus of salient characteristics (for the most part perceptive) and a fringe of fulfilled relations.

  20. In his latter stage, James (1909) believed the notion of “subconscious more” is the centre of personal experience; likewise, he believed that the fringe is linked to our most profound feeling of “rightness” with regards to ourselves and our place in the world.

  21. By identifying the correlates of a mental aspect or those of consciousness itself does not mean the so called hard problem (Chalmers 1996) has been solved; this concerns how subjective experiences can arise from our neuronal architecture and functioning.

  22. In brief, during the experiment the volunteers had to observe the so-called moon faces right way up and upside down and press a button when they saw a human face. The electroencephalogram signal recorded three phases:synchronization (seen as recognition), de-synchronization and a new synchronization (the motor response leading to pressing the button). When nothing was seen, only the second synchronization occurred. Epstein sees de-synchronization as the passage from one substantive thought to another.

  23. “Place cells” identified in hippocampal formation exhibit elevated activity at discrete spots in a given environment, and “the spatial representation is determined primarly on the basis of which cells were active at the starting point and how far and in what direction the animal has moved since then (see McNaughton et al. 2006). Phenomenologically, there an analogy between physical and “inner” travel in man. The research performed by Kosslyn (1980) indicates that mental images work as if they were really spatial.

  24. Recent studies have however highlighted further evidence, see Kumaran and Maguire (2006)

  25. One might object that not all artistic forms have an obvious and common-sense structure, of a kind we are used to see in outer reality (although they can have a specific structure). Non-representational and abstract art provides some examples. The model could be extended to them with further research. It can be argued that an abstract work of art suggests a vague and blurred set of references, none of them clearly identifiable. But their assembly is able to trigger an emotional resonance in the fringe. It is a sheer immersion in the depth of the “je ne sais quoi”. Yet one has probably to be already somehow acquainted with abstract art to gain that perception. In other words, non-representational and abstract art could have an implicit cognitive aspect, necessary to cross the threshold of aesthetic experience.

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Thanks to Peter Farleigh, Riccardo Manzotti and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

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Lavazza, A. Art as a metaphor of the mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 8, 159–182 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9091-5

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